Soft matter science is the science of "soft" materials, like polymers, liquid crystals, colloidal suspensions, ionic solutions, hydrogels and most biological matter. The phenomena that define the properties of these materials occur on mesoscopic length and time scales, where thermal fluctuations play a major role. These scales are hard to tackle both experimentally and theoretically. Instead, computer simulations and other computational techniques play a major role.

The course will give an introduction to the computational tools that are used in soft matter science, like Monte-Carlo (MC) and Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations (on- and off-lattice) and Poisson-Boltzmann theory (and extensions).

Prerequisites

The course is intended for participants in the Master Program "Computational Science", but should also be useful for FIGSS students and for other interested science students.

We expect the participants to have basic knowledge in classical and statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, and partial differential equations, as well as knowledge of a programming language (preferably C or C++).

Lecture and tutorials

The lecture is accompanied by hands-on-tutorials which will be held in the computer room (Physics, 1.120). They consist of practical excercises at the computer, like small programming tasks, simulations, visualisation and data analysis.

The tutorials build on each other, therefore continous attendance is expected.

This pdf file long_range_lecture.pdf (216 KB) contains surely too many details, but I will walk you through in class. In case you like to have some more background material, here is a review article by A. Arnold and me about this topic (arnold05a.pdf (1.12 MB))

12.6.

Continuation of long range lecture, beginning of How to simulate Polymers and Polyelectrolytes.

19.6.

Continuation on How to simulate Polymers and Polyelectrolytes and background of Poisson-Boltzmann Theory.